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Comment by bitmapbrother | Hacker News Reader

Android executes native ARM code. Additionally, average GC pause times are now 0.4ms in Android O. To clarify, that's not 0.4ms for every frame - that's every time the GC needs to do a STW. How many milliseconds does ARC lose during its reclamation of memory on iOS? As for memory usage, Android N did use a bit more memory than iOS apps, but that's also been reduced by Android O.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFE2Utbv1Oo&index=110&list=P...

As for your claim that iOS apps have a significantly less memory footprint overall, well, you would also be wrong about that.

https://youtu.be/lCFpgknkqRE?t=6m27s

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I've heard "java can be as fast as c" for 20 years now and "android is fast and smooth" for 10 years and my experience has always been the opposite. At the point I wouldn't believe them if it was true, there is no credibility left.

ART isn't a JVM. And Objective-C isn't as fast C. There's a reason all of the games and apps that require high performance are written C/C++ on both platforms.

Errrr Android ART is a VM and no you can't write games in C/C++ on Android. While technically it can be done it's pretty much impossible to get it off the ground and running because of the VM in place.

There is a website that lists the games people have created to try it successfully, they give links to couple of them which made it into the Android store and basically you can tell by all the feedback that the game won't load. You can try to run the games too and see if you're lucky, I wasn't....

Objective-C is very quite fast, several notches faster then Java apps

I didn't say ART was not a VM. I said ART is not a JVM. There is a difference.

>and no you can't write games in C/C++ on Android

Of course you can. All of the high end games are written in C/C++. Java, Kotlin, C/C++ are the official languages of Android.

>While technically it can be done it's pretty much impossible to get it off the ground and running because of the VM in place.

Apps that use NDK do not use ART.

>Objective-C is very quite fast, several notches faster then Java apps

No it's not. Please provide proof that Objective-C is several notches faster than Java apps.

That's completely wrong I'm afraid. ART is a standards compliant JVM and Android has supported the native development kit (NDK) for C/C++ apps for years. You can't do everything you can with the Java APIs, but you can open windows and get a GL context with it, which is all most games care about.

The speed of Java is very dependent on the sophistication of the compilers used. Java will walk all over Objective-C if run on a fast server class machine with an advanced JVM like HotSpot.

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